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e d i t i o n i , 2 0 2 0 c g w 2 3 filmmakers realized that having a dog with so much black fur was less than ideal, so they went back to the drawing board – or more accurately, to the kennel. Scrolling through an animal rescue website, Sand- ers' wife found a St. Bernard/Farm Collie that would be a good companion to their aging dog, Brody. She then drove from LA to Kansas and adopted the dog, whose name, ironically, was Buckley. Buckley was light brown in color, which worked better in terms of the lighting and visibility in the night scenes. So Buckley then became the new model on which Buck was loosely based. The artists received new scans and photography to inform the new direction, adapting the existing model, including a complete re-texture and groom. While Buckley proved to be a good reference model, he was not a trained movie dog and thus was unable to be used as a stand-in for lighting reference. (Buckley, did, however, get to walk the red carpet with his new owners at the movie's premiere.) The 3D artists then used variations of the digital asset as Buck's physical condition – more/less body mass, coat condition – changes from sequence to sequence based on the story line. "Unlike the other 12 or 13 dogs in the movie, Buck was the only one we 'designed,'" Nash says. Those other canine characters were based on real dogs that the filmmakers had cast – not for their performance, but rather for their appearances, which were replicated in 3D. A Model Dog MPC is well known in the industry for creat- ing photorealistic animals of all kinds (see "Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!" page 18), and has an equally impressive reference library in terms of the material breadth, including a wide range of animal behaviors and actions to reference. To build Buck, MPC artists used Pixologic's ZBrush and Autodesk's Maya: ZBrush to trans- late the key art to 3D, and Maya for topology UVs and so forth. A combination of Maya and ZBrush was used for the facial shapes. For the fur, MPC used the latest incarna- tion of its in-house grooming tool, Furtility. To get an idea of how much fur was involved, Buck has about seven million hairs, and a percentage of those were used by the tech-anim department for simulation. Indeed, Buck's fur was a big undertaking, particularly since he is put through so many situations and conditions. He gets wet, he gets muddy, he rolls around in the snow. And all those scenarios were reflected in the condition of his fur. The same goes for the other dogs. To this end, Buck had several groom variations – for instance, "healthy," "on the trail," "icy,' "wet," "soaking." Tech- anim was able to use those varying looks and even mix between them, depending on the needs of the sequences, says Davies. Another challenge for the artists was creating the dog's facial features, which had to hold up in a number of close-up shots, especially those that were tight on the character's eyes. "We were always reflect- ing the environment in the surface of the eye, or an actor if Buck was face-to-face with someone," says Nash. "The asset and lighting teams did some incredible work with the eyes." In essence, the artists received an in- depth biology lesson, as a veterinarian sur- geon provided the group with information about the physiology of the eye and how the various surfaces react to light, as well as how skin color and age inform the eye color and retina reflections. "As a result, we remodeled the geometry of the eye and updated the textures and shading," Davies explains. The group took their investigation even further, arranging for a dissection session with video and photography capture to reinforce the asset team's understanding of eyes in general – knowledge they were able to transfer to the task at hand when modeling the character. In Motion Nash emphasizes that no motion capture was used to animate Buck or the other animals; they were 100 percent keyframed. However, in some instances, Buck's per- formance was informed by Terry Notary (Planet of the Apes), particularly for instanc- es during principal photography in which Buck is interacting with and around humans. Nevertheless, there was always an animator interpreting Notary's performance and then using that as inspiration for the keyframed performance in the film. "As talented as Notary is, it's important to Here, Buck as well as the background are computer-generated.